Originally Posted by
Badly Ironed Shirt
Take my word for it too. Thatcher split communities and families in 1984 with her approach to the miner's strike. She decimated them further by overseeing the closure of the pits. It's debatable if that was an act of spite or not, I have my own suspicions. She then made things even worse by massaging the unemployment figures and putting people on the sick. These people are now ostracized by Joe Public and Theresa May. They are then thrown into a goldfish bowl for people to watch in glorious UHD - this solves nothing and only makes stereotyping easier. I was a schoolkid in the 80s, one text book three kids, many of us having free school dinners (our only meal), and many of us growing up in a household where both parents weren't working for long spells. My old man was out of work for two years in the mid 80s, and some of my earliest memories were waiting outside the job centre with him before it opened, and his sheer optimism and balls of steel as he took knock back after knock back. The Tories of today would portray our household for those two years as a disgusting statistic, and would fuel the Daily Mail headline writers with stories of scroungers and the welfare state. Thatcher may well have improved the country, and made Britain "great" again, but we didn't feel it and nor did many of my school mates. I remember scrounging crisps off mates, and mates scrounging crisps off me.
The thing is, there is still a strong sense of community in the valleys, moreso than Cardiff. Of course, there are bad people in the Valleys. Tell me somewhere where there are not bad people? The Valleys seem to be the 21st Century joke that Liverpool of the 1980s was. Truth is, the area has been crying out for investment since the 70s, and it has been let down by Tories and Blairites alike.